Adobe Lightroom: Spot Removal – Cloning vs Healing

The Spot Removal Tool has greatly improved in Lightroom 5, with a new advanced healing brush for retouching and object removal. So now you can do pretty much all of your correcting right in the Develop Module without having to jump over to Photoshop. In this tutorial I’ll show you how to use the tool and demonstrate the difference between healing and cloning. Healing samples the tone and texture of the area while cloning copies and pastes and the results can be strikingly different. There are times when one is more effective than the other, and sometimes it comes down to experimentation and trying them both. Lightroom makes it easy to switch between the two and you can also adjust the opacity of the effect. Using these tools, you can heal blemishes and reduce wrinkles in portraits and remove unwanted objects. The new spot visualization feature will help you find small spots like sensor dust so you can quickly remove them.